3/16/2020

Dealing with Covid-19, Emmanuel Macron seems to be singing from the same hymn sheet as Angela Merkel, who is also against closing borders, but is this not a case of Western liberal ideology overriding necessity and common sense?

Compare and contrast. In his speech to the nation last night, Macron declared: “This virus has no passport.” He added: “We will undoubtedly take measures to close borders, but only when it is relevant… It is at the European level that we have built our freedoms.”

Macron is closing all schools, nurseries, universities and day care centres from next week and has called on the vulnerable to isolate themselves. But if anyone can still come into France unchecked from countries where coronavirus is even more of a problem, won’t those measures be undermined?

Ditto Germany. Angela Merkelsaid this week that “we in Germany, in any case, are of the opinion that border closures are not an appropriate response to the challenge.”

Contrast this ‘open borders,’‘we must protect Schengen’ approach with that of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Hungary who are all EU member states. Declaring a 30-day ‘state of emergency,’ the Czech government has closed its borders to people from 15 countries hit by coronavirus and banned its citizens from visiting these countries too. From Monday next week, all international travel to and from Czechia will be essentially prohibited.

Slovakia is closing its borders today to all foreigners except those who have a residency permit, while announcing that all Slovaks who have been abroad will have to face two weeks of quarantine. Austria has barred all people entering the country from Italy, unless they have a medical certificate. Hungary has banned arrivals from Italy, China and Iran.

But in Western Europe, it seems a commitment to maintaining ‘open borders,’ even at a time of a potentially very extreme health crisis, trumps other concerns.

An example of this fundamentalist and very dogmatic approach can be seen in the tweet from Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt who declared: “Nationalism isn’t the answer to COV19, because viruses don’t care about borders or nationalities.”

International travel may broaden the mind, but unfortunately, it also helps Covid-19 to spread.

You really don’t have to be Albert Einstein to understand that the more open the borders, the greater chance of a country seeing its coronavirus cases rise. Yet the most powerful countries in the EU – unlike the more pragmatic ones in central and eastern Europe – seem to be putting virtue signaling and liberal ideology first. Of course, there’s a moral case that can be made for ‘free movement,’but in a time of crisis, governments have to forget all that and put protecting their own citizens first. Nationalism? No, it’s just doing what governments are elected to do.

If we can criticize Macron and Merkel on these grounds, we can criticize Boris Johnson too. Plane loads of people arriving from the worst affected areas of Italy have been arriving in Britain without any proper checks. On last night’s BBC Question Time, Professor John Ashton, a former director of public health, noted how around 3,000 supporters of the Spanish football team Atletico Madrid were in Liverpool this week for a Champions League tie. Spain’s Corona cases, as of Wednesday, had surpassed 1,600 with about half of them in the Madrid region.

Two-thirds of Spain’s deaths from the virus have occurred in the Madrid region. Yet, as Professor Ashton pointed out, the Madrilenos would have been out and about in Liverpool on Tuesday and Wednesday, drinking in bars, staying in hotels, traveling on public transport. How can governments say they are doing everything they can to stop the spread of coronavirus when unrestricted travel from Covid-19 ‘hotspots’ is still taking place?

It may be true, as Macron says, that “It is at the European level that we have built our freedoms,” but what price ‘freedom’ if it means the ‘freedom’ to die from coronavirus because the most logical, common sense step of all is not taken?

“Aged 45, the alleged perpetrator of the knife attack that killed four people at the Paris Police Prefecture had converted to Islam 18 months ago, according to our information,” BFMTV reports. “The reasons for his murderous act are not known for the moment.”

The suspect was shot dead during the attack by a rookie officer who had only been stationed for four months.

“For a young colleague, not very experienced, fresh out of school who must make use of his weapon over a colleague, the psychological impact must be immense,” said Nicolas Pucheu, a police union spokesman. “I think it will take a lot, a lot of time to recover from his emotions.”

The alleged perpetrator’s wife has been taken into custody.

Prominent political leader and anti-Islamization figurehead Marine Le Pen has called on prosecutors to disclose the suspect’s possible motives quickly and clearly to the public.

“In order to avoid inevitable rumors, the government and the prosecutor’s office must promptly inform the French about the elements available to them regarding the profile and motivations of the murderer who killed three police officers and an administrative officer at the police station,” Le Pen wrote on social media.

The attack comes just a day after a Paris police “anger march” in protest of poor pay, long hours, and conditions that have led to a rash of officer suicides.

Climate change action meant to consolidate globalist control

While President Trump rubbed elbows with globalists at G7 in Biarritz, France, he did not attend the assembly’s climate talks.

In one of the conference’s last meetings, various heads of state held discussions addressing the issue of manmade global warming.

Photos circulating show world leaders including Germany’s Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and others sitting around a table while a chair in the middle was left noticeably vacant.

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said the president was busy with other meetings when the climate conference took place, but noted a staffer sat in his stead.

“The President had scheduled meetings and bilaterals with Germany and India, so a senior member of the Administration attended in his stead,” Grisham said in a statement.

While a national security staffer sat in for Trump, CNN’s Jim Acosta criticized the president saying the empty seat was symbolic of the administration’s position on climate change in the past few years.

“We should note to our viewers Prime Minister Modi of India and Chancellor Merkel were at that climate session here at the G7 summit,” Acosta stated. “So we’re not getting a lot of straight answers. Perhaps we’ll get some, perhaps we won’t, at this joint press conference when the president and Emmanuel Macron come out here in just a short while.”

CNN’s editor-in-chief Chris Cillizza was also miffed, but unsurprised by the president’s absence: Donald Trump didn’t accidentally forget the climate change meeting. He didn’t decide he wanted to meet with staff from the governments of India and Germany. He just didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to sit around and be, in his mind, lectured by foreign leaders about how he needs to think and feel about the issue.

Trump has referred the idea of manmade global warming a hoax, and made removing the US from the Paris Climate Accord one of his first acts as president.

Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga has announced that she will be starting an investigation into censorship of political views on social media in Hungary and across Europe.

The Hungarian minister made her announcement on social media platform Facebook over the weekend, saying she would be creating a “working group” within the ministry to “investigate the possibilities for a legal environment to ensure the transparency of social media service providers – both on EU and national level.”

“Originally their job would not be to influence societal processes and elections by censoring comments on an ideological basis, however, if they had done it once they shall accept the necessity of the regulation and follow the rules of democracy,” she added.

The announcement comes only a month after Emmanuel Macron’s government announced it would be taking the opposite view and would look to force search engines and social media networks to censor “hate speech” in France.

The measure, which was passed in early July, would see large fines for internet companies who do not remove offending material within a 24-hour period.

The European Union has also pushed for censorship of “hate speech” on social media in recent years, including proposing a similar law to the French legislation in September of last year.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has also demanded social media companies remove “hate speech” and introduced fines of up to 50 million euros for companies which violate the policy.

Social media censorship has been a major issue in the United States with President Donald J. Trump looking to use various agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to potentially regulate online censorship through an executive order.

A leaked draft of the executive order, entitled “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship,”would allow the FCC to change how social media companies are treated under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which allows tech companies to censor lewd or questionable content.

Facebook‘s plan to hook ad-cash-deprived mainstream outlets on licensing payouts seems to be an attempt to hijack narrative control en route to total domination of the infosphere – the ultimate safe space, Zuckerberg-style.

More than two thirds of American adults get their news from social media at the same time that more than half expectthat news to be “largely inaccurate.” Perhaps sensing a business opportunity, Facebook has moved in to manage that news consumption, reportedly offering mainstream outlets millions of dollars per year to license their content in order to present it to users authoritatively, as “Facebook News” – having long since ceased trusting users to share news among themselves.

But trusting Facebook to deliver the news is like trusting a cheetah to babysit your gazelles – all that’s left at the end is likely to be a pile of bones. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergwarned legacy media last year that if they did not work with his plan to “revitalize journalism,” they would be left dying “like in a hospice.”

Dangling a few million in front of news outlets after depriving them of the advertising cash on which they once subsisted is merely the final step in the process of consolidation and control that began when Facebook removed actual news from its newsfeed in an effort to manage the narrative in the run-up to the 2016 election. A move ostensibly designed to “favor friends and family over publishers,”it instead plunged mainstream and especially alternative media into financial oblivion, setting them scrambling to recoup lost traffic as their place in subscribers’ feeds was taken by cat videos and family snapshots.

Alternative media were further marginalized after Zuckerberg inked a deal with the Atlantic Council – NATO‘s narrative-managers whose board is populated by some of the most notorious warmongers of recent history – who arrived to set the platform straight after it failed to deliver the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton. The group would ensure Facebook played a “positive role”in democracy in the future, a press release promised. Six months later, hundreds of popular political pages had been purged for getting in the way of the Atlantic Council’s version of “democracy.”Several more purges followed, many pages getting the axe for nothing more than espousing views “favorable to Iran’s national interests” or posting content with “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes.”

Zuckerberg has never hidden his desire to see Facebook become an internet driver’s license, and he has no doubt watched gleefully as French President Emmanuel Macron‘s government weighs requiring citizens to turn over actual identity documents in order to sign up to use Facebook. The platform was the first to adopt an intelligence-agency-friendly “real name policy,” irritating political activists, performers, and others who prefer not to have their social media activity follow them around in real life.

Privacy advocates are currently up in arms over the FBI’s recently-revealed plans to monitor social media platforms in real time. Combined with the recently leaked FBI decision to label all “conspiracy theorists” as potentially-dangerous domestic extremists, this looks an awful lot like a manufactured rationale to spy on the majority of the US population. Yet Facebook has been feeding users’ data to the government for over a decade. It joined the NSA’s PRISM program in 2009, providing the agency with its own convenient backdoor for slurping up the data others have had to hack themselves. Not that that’s been very hard – Facebook admitted last year that data on “most” of its users has been compromised at some point by “malicious actors.”

Facebook’s decision to hire one of the co-authors of the notorious PATRIOT Act as General Counsel earlier this year was touted as a move that would help the company “fulfill its mission.” Which would be what, exactly?

Despite its egregious privacy record, the areas of reality outside Zuckerberg’s control are dwindling rapidly. With the rollout of Facebook’s Libra coin, commerce, too, is falling under the shadow of this menacingly bland figure.

When Zuckerberg was photographed traveling through Middle America several years ago, many pointed out it looked like he was running for president. His announcement around the same time that he had found religion – a vague, made-for-TV, feel-good faith guaranteed not to antagonize anyone – also had the feel of a campaign move. If Facebook – and Zuckerberg’s – history is any guide, he has bigger things in mind for Facebook News than a new tab on the user interface. Every campaign needs a press office, after all…

Respondents to the clip were not too impressed given that Algerian fans have rioted in, looted and trashed major French cities twice within the last two weeks alone.

As we reported on Monday, nearly 3000 were arrested across France as fans celebrated their team’s Africa Cup of Nations semi-final win by throwing smoke bombs, projectiles, and firecrackers at police.

VIDEO: Algerian football fans and police clash in Marseille, France, after their team win the Africa Cup of Nations semi-final with a 2-1 victory over three-time champions Nigeria pic.twitter.com/q9Y3V9ZBhT

Quite how the Socialist Mayor thought it was a good idea to attach himself to such criminality is anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, Breitbart reports, “A study of the election preferences of the French military and the gendarmes has revealed an increasing trend to support populist leader Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National (National Rally/RN).”

Undocumented migrants calling themselves the ‘Black Vest’ protesters flooded the Pantheon in Paris and demanded the right to remain in France. The protesters vowed to remain on site until all of the illegals get proper papers.

Some 200-300 undocumented migrants stormed the Pantheon – a popular tourist site and mausoleum – where the most renowned French national heroes, such as Voltaire or Victor Hugo, are buried.

The majority of the protesters, who call themselves ‘Black Vests’ – in an analogy with the Yellow Vests movement – are believed to be migrants of West African origin.

“We are paperless, voiceless, faceless for the French Republic. We come to the graves of your great men to denounce your disrespect,” one of the protest organizers said in a statement ahead of the event.

“We will remain here until the last one of us has been given documents,” a leaflet given out by an organiser read.

The protest triggered a massive police response, several people have been reportedly detained. Initially, the event was maily peaceful with the protesters displaying banners and shouting slogans without getting rowdy and avoiding scuffles with law enforcement.

After spending several hours inside, the protesters vacated the monument, yet refused to disperse and tried to held a sit-in protest in front of it.

The situation around the Pantheon eventually turned violent with police repeatedly charging the crowd in an attempt to disperse it. Police used batons and pepper spray to subdue the protesters; several people have been reportedly injured in the scuffles.

Right wing leader Marine Le Pen called the occupation unacceptable. She tweeted: “In France, the only future for any illegal immigrant should be getting kicked out, because that’s the law.”

There were those among the French politicians who, on the contrary, voiced support. “It’s very important for me that everything goes – at the moment –without violence, peacefully. I hope that their demands will be heard, these people have been protesting for a long time, yet so far they see nothing from the government but a closed door,” Eric Coquerel, a member of the National Assembly, stated.

A similar protest was staged by the group back in May, when the Black Vests occupied Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. The protesters demanded legal papers for all, as well as accused the Air France carrier of collaborating with the government in the quest to deport illegal migrants.